Author: user

One of my biggest weaknesses is that I’m a terrible judge of people. Take Patty, for example.

Patty works at a large hospital system in central Pennsylvania (and although I’m changing her name she’s real). She is the administrator for a group of 30 hospital “consultants” who are tasked with visiting doctors and healthcare firms in a 500-mile radius to make them aware of the systems’ many offerings, from rehabilitative services to therapy and preventative care. When I first met Patty she was introduced to me as the person responsible for the new CRM system we were implementing for them. And I was concerned. Patty didn’t look the part to me. She was older (in her late 50’s at the time). She didn’t seem very technical-savvy. She talked slow and she moved slow. She didn’t seem very motivated at the time. She seemed like she was waiting on retirement, rather than getting to implement a CRM system for 30 people.

Which concerned me. Because Patty’s job was absolutely critical for the success of this implementation. Why?

Her job, as the CRM Administrator, meant that she would be ultimately responsible for the integrity of the data in the system. If information was missing, out of date, or wrong, it would be her responsibility to fix the problem and implement the right procedures to ensure that it didn’t happen again. As the CRM Administrator, Patty would have to know the system inside and out. She would have to be familiar with customizing reports, doing ad-hoc queries on the go, creating workflows, and sending mass emails when needed. She would be the go-to person for any questions or problems. She would train new employees on how the system would be used. She would maintain a custom manual specifically tailored to the group’s processes. She would be responsible for making sure that everyone was using the system the right way and consistently. Because a CRM system is only effective if people are using it. And her job was to help people use it.

And I was worried. To me, Patty just didn’t seem to have the right stuff for the job. As we started the implementation, I gave it a less than 50% chance of success. And of course, as usual, I was wrong. Patty took the ball that we threw at her… and ran with it.

She not only embraced the system, but she spent the hours needed to learn it as well as we knew it. But more importantly, she exercised the authority given to her by her boss to get others to use it, too. She made it a point to ensure that each user had the appropriate training and support. She worked with us to setup the right kind of access on smartphones, tablets, and laptops that fit the workflow of the group’s employees. She trained herself online. She dug into the details of setting up forms, creating custom reports, and configuring workflows. She made mistakes and she fixed them. She did research when she didn’t know the answers. She was relentless in asking us for help. And when it came to her group, she took no prisoners: she wiped noses, changed diapers, and smacked people in the head (all figuratively of course) when they didn’t follow the rules. She set up alerts in the system to notify her when certain fields were changed or hadn’t been changed in a long time. The buck stopped with Patty. She owned the CRM system. She loved the CRM system. And I couldn’t have been more surprised… or wrong.

So what happened? Success. Patty’s boss smartly gave her full authority to do what she needed to do to make it work. And so she did—with a combination of empathy and tough love. Six months into it, her group was using the system to track activities, send and receive emails, manage opportunities, quickly access their information wherever they were and, most importantly, maintain a database with accurate and complete information that was not only relied upon by the group’s managers in daily and weekly reports but also by the hospital’s marketing team who used that data to communicate services and offerings to the physician community in the area. Patty was in on it all. It was her system. And it succeeded because of her.

Insightly is easy to use and easy to set up, but no matter how easy it is to use, a CRM system needs a Patty to succeed. Without a central CRM Administrator, you’re looking at nothing but a messy rolodex, if best. My company has implemented hundreds of CRM systems over the past decade and the one similar trait of each success implementation is that they had a Patty. This is not a technical person. And it’s not your IT staff. It’s a person who likes technology, isn’t afraid to learn, and has no problem kicking the group into gear so that they’re doing what they need to do—all with the authorization of management, of course. Make sure you’ve got a Patty in place before you move forward with your implementation. And if you ask me to recommend someone, make sure to do the exact opposite. You won’t be sorry.

Find your internal champion and take a look at Insightly’s plans and features to see if it’s the right CRM for you. You can sign up for a limited free account or try the 14-day trial for all functions.

About the Author: Gene Marks is a small business owner, technology expert, author and columnist. He writes regularly for leading US media outlets such as The New York Times, Forbes, Inc. Magazine and Entrepreneur. He has authored five books on business management and appears regularly on Fox News, Fox Business, MSNBC and CNBC. Gene runs a ten-person CRM and technology consulting firm outside of Philadelphia. Learn more at genemarks.com

Turn It Up Tuesday: Tips from Insightly to Take Your Business to 11

Welcome to Turn It Up Tuesday, where we bring you 3 weekly tips—a tip on using Insightly, a tip on running your business, and a tip on improving your life. Enjoy this week’s email tips!

Save Important Business Emails to Insightly

It’s important to keep track of correspondence with your customers, and finding an important email when you need it can save time, prevent confusion, and maybe even save a deal or two. To make finding these items even easier, Insightly includes an Emails tab where you can file away copies of messages relating to your customers, sales opportunities, and projects.   Save important email messages to your CRM by forwarding or CC’ing them to your Insightly mailbox address. Even better, Insightly customers using Insightly for Google Apps or Outlook 2013 can not only save emails with the tools that appear right in your inbox, you can also create records like tasks and opportunities right from the Gmail gadget or App for Outlook 2013.

Manage Your Email and Keep Your Focus

Your head is for having ideas, not holding them. – David Allen   David Allen’s advice and Getting Things Done method have helped many people better manage their time and tasks. Rather than thinking about something twice, you can write it down or set a reminder for later so that you can focus on your current goal and get more done.If you’re reading emails more than once, it’s not such a jump to compare your inbox to your brain—there’s so much to do that important things can get lost in there! There are many methods to sort through the clutter. You can create email folders to move messages out of your inbox and prioritize or mark them for follow-up.   When reaching out to someone you could BCC yourself, but this could add to the clutter. If you’re sending invoices for clients or requesting assets from a freelancer or estimates from a vendor, a tool like Boomerang for Gmail can automatically remind you to follow up if you don’t get a response after a certain amount of time. And you can also schedule emails to be sent later, setting up your follow-up even before you need to follow up!

Protect Your Private Information When Sending Email

Would you ever send information like credit card or social security numbers on a postcard? It’s easy to understand that what you write on a postcard is visible to whoever handles it, but it’s not so clear that email has similar problems. Email takes a long and convoluted path over the Internet, albeit a fast one, and passes through many computer systems before it reaches a recipient. This is the reason why industries like healthcare and finance are required to have secure messaging for patients and clients.   Encrypting your email is an option to regain some privacy, but it still carries risks if you’re on a public WiFi network. Rather than sending such sensitive information in an email message, one option is to save it in a password-protected document, transfer it through a secure file transfer service like Send This or Dropbox, and then provide the password separately through email or phone.

Send Us Your Tips

Would you like to share your tips with other Insightly customers? Send them to us!
If we use one in our weekly feature we’ll send you a $10 Amazon Gift Card!

Contact us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or send us an email.

If you haven’t tried the best CRM around, sign up for Insightly’s 14-day free trial for our premium plan or try our free account for the basics.

About the author: Tony Roma is Insightly’s Content Manager. He’s been helping businesses implement software solutions and improve their workflows for over ten years.

Turn It Up Tuesday: Tips from Insightly to Take Your Business to 11

Welcome to Turn It Up Tuesday, where we bring you 3 weekly tips—a tip on using Insightly, a tip on running your business, and a tip on improving your life. Enjoy this week’s tips on using categories to organize and improve business!

Like Insightly Categories? Make them Super!

This week’s Insightly tip comes from our customer Gene Barton, Ph.D., President of Paradigm Systems, Inc. We’ll be sending him a $10 Amazon gift card for his contribution. Thank you, Gene!   “You might assume that you should use different colors for each category, and that works well. However, Insightly doesn’t stop you from reusing the same color for different categories. Categories are already distinct by their names. So you can create “super categories” by colors that quickly identify what geographic region, subdivision, product line, etc., categories relate to.”

Regroup Products and Services to Attract More Sales

If you’ve ever been approached by a customer who had a need they were willing to pay a little extra for, or if you’ve a lost sale because a prospect needed a less-expensive option than you currently offer, you could be in a position to offer both simpler and premium versions of your product or service to capture more sales. This strategy can bring in new customers, open the door to return business, and increase revenue. It’s also a well-known pricing rule that when you have two items with different prices listed, you’ll drive more sales overall.

Sort Out Your Goals for Better Focus

The goals you’ve set for the new year can seem overwhelming and exhausting to think about, but you can reduce the anxiety that often gets in the way by organizing your tasks and goals to help you prioritize and move forward. At a high level, you’ll want to group your goals into a life categories like “Finance,” “Health,” “Professional Development,” and “Family.” Write down these categories and goals, and then evaluate each group separately, prioritizing and eliminating the tasks involved. You can then start budgeting time for the urgent and important items, with less time for the things that need less attention. A little planning can go a long way to reduce the stress of achieving your goals.

Send Us Your Tips

Would you like to share your tips with other Insightly customers? Send them to us!
If we use one in our weekly feature we’ll send you a $10 Amazon Gift Card!

Contact us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or send us an email.

If you haven’t tried the best CRM around, sign up for Insightly’s 14-day free trial for our premium plan or try our free account for the basics.

Turn It Up Tuesday: Tips from Insightly to Take Your Business to 11

Welcome to Turn It Up Tuesday, where we bring you 3 weekly tips—a tip on using Insightly, a tip on running your business, and a tip on improving your life. Enjoy this week’s tips!

Connect Other Apps to Insightly

Computer software has completely changed how we work, and online applications have made our lives even easier with powerful features that can be accessed from any internet connection. If you’re using Insightly to manage your contacts, sales pipelines, and project tasks, it’s likely you’re also using other applications to manage aspects of your business. That doesn’t mean you need to jump from browser tab to browser tab when you want to check the status of an invoice or add a contact to a marketing mailing list. With integrations, you can often bring information and actions together in one app or another. For example, on paid accounts, Insightly offers an integration with QuickBooks Online to display invoice and payment information directly in your contact record. As Insightly becomes even more popular, other vendors have started building their own integrations using Insightly’s open API to accommodate their customers’ needs. Zapier’s entire focus is on connecting apps like Insightly to other applications. From PandaDoc for document signing and management to TimeCamp for time tracking, we’ve listed them all on our integrations page. Take a look and see if you can connect your other apps or discover new ones to turn up the dial on your productivity! User Insightly’s QuickBooks Online integration to view invoices and payments.

Strategic Partnerships Can Reach New Customers

There’s power in community, so partnering with other businesses in your industry or related industries can result in increased business for all parties and higher satisfaction for your customers. A florist who works with the antique shop down the street to display sample arrangements in their vases will help lead customers from one business to another while increasing local awareness and opportunity. An online accounting service could partner with computer consultants to manage the technical side of hardware and software installation, getting customers up and running with fewer hurdles. Think about ways of cross-promoting services while serving your customers’ needs. Use Alignable to check out if other local businesses have ideas. Research the reputation of compatible businesses, reach out to them to explain the benefits and goals of a partnership, and be frank about the hurdles you might face. Working together, you can increase your customer base and enhance your customers’ trust in you—a surefire way to keep business growing.

Find Your Communities

It’s a common complaint that technology is keeping people apart as our eyes gaze down at our phones and screens. While some parts of the world are indeed more neighborly and less technology-focused than others, the fact is that communities are all around us, and there are more and more ways to create and connect to them—both online and offline. Sites like Meetup allow you to find and start groups to meet people with shared interests, from dancing to welding to crocheting. And others, like Reddit and Pinterest, are online communities that help you share advice and information to help solve problems and offer support. If you want to volunteer locally, VolunteerMatch and individual charities have sites where you can sign up, get involved, and meet new people. Of course, lifting our eyes from our screens at the local coffee shop or library, we are bound to find something interesting on the good, old-fashioned bulletin board or a poster on the window. Building a local network helps you make new friends and bring your community closer together, a good thing for you and for everyone around you.

Send Us Your Tips

Would you like to share your tips with other Insightly customers? Send them to us!
If we use one in our weekly feature we’ll send you a $10 Amazon Gift Card!

Contact us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or send us an email.

If you haven’t tried the best CRM around, sign up for Insightly’s 14-day free trial for our premium plan or try our free account for the basics.

You would think the customer would be your best friend for project engagement, right? After all, they want what you want: Success. They want roadblocks cleared for your delivery team. They want dead-on correct requirements. They want to give us as much money as is needed to get it done. Well, maybe not that last one. But they do want us to succeed.

Pleasing the customer is huge; it’s one of the main success determiners in the project management world, and definitely a key to success for small businesses and individual consultants. You can’t afford to offend customers, you can’t afford to lose customers—you can’t afford to drive them away at all. But do they always know what’s best for the project? Should you do whatever they want you to do? Should you act on everything they say or ask for? You may have to say no to that. Let’s explore this concept further and figure out why.

It Starts with a Perceived Issue, Need, or Problem

The customer may already be on your radar and in your customer relationship management (CRM) system as a previous contact. Or they may come to you from nowhere through an Internet search or a recommendation about our services. Either way, they have become your client—either your consulting client or your organization’s client—because they have a need or a problem that needs to be resolved.

However, they may not have done the up-front preparation and digging to really know what their problem is, so they come with a perceived solution that they want implemented rather than letting the consultant figure out what the real solution should be. So should small business consultants always do what the customer wants? Maybe not, and sometimes that can cause some early customer friction. Be careful, but be firm.

Approach the Project in an Analytic Manner

While there is an issue that likely needs to be resolved, you won’t be certain right away what that issue is and the customer may not have all the requirements figured out coming into the engagement. No matter how hard the customer tries to convince you that they know all about what they need, keep digging to make sure this is true.

Remember, You are the Expert

You, your team, your organization—you are the experts. That’s why the customer came to you, so it’s more than okay to put the brakes on at the beginning of the project and work through additional planning and investigation. You may get pushback from the customer if they think that’s just a drain on their funds, and they are entitled to that thought. You must step back and explain to them that your mission isn’t necessarily to deliver what they tell you to deliver, it’s to deliver the right solution to their problem. In a perfect world, those two would align but we don’t live in a perfect world. If your project view differs greatly from your customer’s project view, remind them that you are the expert and it’s your job to ask questions and to find out what the real need is and what the real solution needs to be.

Is the Customer Really in the Way?

It all depends on the project, the customer, and how well the project manager or consultant is able to manage the customer. A good project manager keeps them engaged, working on tasks, and participating every step of the way. This can keep the customer from getting in the way of success and allows them to be a valuable contributor on the team. Use the customer and all of their expertise to fully define requirements, truly pinpoint the problem, identify all the risks, and help you manage the solution to a successful ending. If your customer initially wants to run the project, you’ll need to set expectations about your leadership role and communication processes early on. By doing this, you will instill confidence in the customer and stop many of these potential problems from ever happening. While you won’t encounter these problems with most customers, you’ll still have to watch for the overbearing client who wants to tell you what to do throughout the project.

Try Insightly – CRM & Project Management! Sign up for a free account or a 14-day trial of our premium plan.

Customer relationship management is key for small businesses to thrive. Every small business owner should look into online CRM as an affordable and easy-to-use option that will help you grow your business and develop stronger ties with your customers.

When implementing an online CRM, businesses drive down sales costs by 23% and get a return of $8.71 for every $1 spent on average—not a bad way to reduce expenses and boost income! That kind of ROI comes from increasing collaboration, having customer information readily available at your desk and on mobile devices, and making it easier to connect to your customers on social media.

If you’re running a small business, ask yourself the questions below and let the numbers guide you. If your goal is to grow and thrive, chances are you want to shop for an online CRM.

Insightly CRM includes intuitive and easy-to-use features to help you grow your business:

• A cloud-based service that’s accessible from your web browser to your iOS or Android device.
• Social network information based on your contacts’ email addresses.
• Integrations with many popular online business tools, including QuickBooks, Google Apps, and MailChimp.

See the full list of features on our pricing page, and sign up for a free Insightly account or try a 14-day trial of our paid plans.

With so much opportunity for growth, it would be a shame to pass up on a way to make every workday easier.

Tips from Insightly to Take Your Business to 11

Welcome to Turn It Up Tuesday, where we bring you 3 weekly tips—a tip on using Insightly, a tip on running your business, and a tip on improving your life. Enjoy this week’s tips!

Find Answers at Insightly Help and Insightly Resources

Are you the do-it-yourself type? Customers who like to dive in and figure out how things work are quick to set up Insightly and start adding records thanks to Insightly’s ease of use. That’s why Insightly has a self-service model that offers many options to learn how to use Insightly CRM more effectively. A good method to answer questions and learn about Insightly is to open one browser window to view information from the following links while working in Insightly in another browser window. Insightly Resources includes the links below and more, so it’s a great place to select from your favorite kind of documentation and video options to learn about CRM and Insightly. If you’re interested in tutorials, Insightly University has got you covered. From a general overview to record links to managing projects, you’ll find step-by-step video guides to walk you through Insightly. Our Help pages include articles to answer hundreds of questions. With a quick search, you’ll always find answers. And to stay up to date on new product developments, click the Product News section right here on our blog! Update (6/23/2015): Insightly has a brand-new place for support articles, videos, an Insightly user community, and product feature requests! Check out Insightly Support to get all the information you need to make the most out of your CRM!

Offer the Right Support for Your Customers

There are a wide variety of customers you will encounter as your business grows. Offering a matching variety of service options to capture their attention will help you earn and keep more business. An internet presence is essential for customers to find you in the digital age, but your type of business and the types of customers you attract will define how you offer continuing support and service. If you understand your customer demographics and psychographics, you can determine the best way to present them with information about how you can help them, how they can help themselves, and how you can support them. If your business is phone-based, for example, you will likely want to expand your phone support hours as your business grows. If your customers prefer email options to contact you whenever they have time, be sure to set up an auto-reply message to let them know when you’ll get back to them. Make the options clear and set expectations up-front—clear communication and lots of options are key.

Continue Your Education on the Internet

You’re always working hard and, hopefully, you’re taking time to pursue other interests and keep your mind in good shape. After all, you never know where you’ll find inspiration for a great business idea. Pursuing an education doesn’t always mean earning a degree, and today’s online options are far more accessible than the correspondence courses of the early 20th century. Sites like edX, Coursera, and Khan Academy are great paths to learn new skills and gain understanding through free coursework that you can view on your own time. If you’re just looking for a quick review on a topic, YouTube and Wikipedia are always great resources for a refresher, whether you want to improve your golf game, find out why your computer engineer keeps talking about snakes, or spackle that hole in the wall.

Send Us Your Tips

Would you like to share your tips with other Insightly customers? Send them to us!
If we use one in our weekly feature we’ll send you a $10 Amazon Gift Card!

Contact us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or send us an email.

If you haven’t tried the best CRM around, sign up for Insightly’s 14-day free trial for our premium plan or try our free account for the basics.